First it was Berkeley getting caught in l'affaire Peevey. Now it's UCLA. (Peevey was head of the state Public Utilities Commission and has been accused as acting for the utilities in that capacity.) In both cases - it should be noted - the problem seems to have been at the PUC, not the campuses.

From the San Francisco Chronicle: The former head of the California Public Utilities Commission pressured
two Southern California utilities last year to make donations to a
school at UCLA where he then landed a post on an advisory board,
documents revealed Wednesday show. The panel’s then-president, Michael Peevey, urged that Southern
California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric Co. donate the money as
part of a deal to shut down their jointly owned San Onofre nuclear
power plant, which had been offline for more than a year because of
steam generator problems, according to documents that Edison made
public... In September 2014, when the utilities commission took up the San
Onofre shutdown deal, (PUC member Mike) Florio proposed that it include $25 million from
Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric for greenhouse gas research at UC
Berkeley over five years. Before the panel approved the deal,
commissioners amended it to give the money to UCLA.That same month, Peevey joined the the advisory board
for the UCLA Luskin School of Public Policy’s Center for Innovation.
E-mails released earlier this year show that in December 2013, Peevey
had mentioned to a university official the possibility that utility
money could be directed to UCLA’s Center for Sustainable Communities,
which is part of the Luskin School...

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

At this year’s graduation ceremony, the class of 2015 will get the
chance to learn an important lesson: In the real world, success is
measured in bills, not principles. The keynote speaker for UCLA’s commencement ceremony has just been announced as Nathan Myhrvold. He is the cofounder of Intellectual Ventures, the worlds biggest “patent troll,”
a company that exploits the loopholes in the patent-granting system by
collecting patents and suing other companies, both big and small, hoping
to get a piece of their revenue...

...USC’s president, C.L. Max Nikias...takes [a] contrarian
view of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, a free education
movement that is taking root at many prominent colleges and
universities. USC doesn’t do MOOCs. It offers plenty of online
education, especially at the graduate level, but for a price. “That’s
our business model,” he said. Nikias said giving away what the
university provides would be counterproductive. “We’re the ones who
admit students, and we’re the ones who are going to issue degrees,” he
said. “At the end of the day, I feel that without our
academic brand, we’re nothing. Literally nothing.”...

The University of Southern California's new online M.B.A.
program is the latest entry in a renaissance for such degree offerings, a
development program directors say has been made possible by advances in
technology that connect students and professors online. The USC Marshall School of Business will launch its program
this fall, marking the first time the university has offered the degree
at a distance. Students in the 21-month program, which is split into
five semesters, will tackle one course of three to four topics at a
time, covering much of the required readings and assignments at their
own pace but checking in with classmates and professors during weekly
live online sessions. Unlike programs at other universities, which
include regular campus visits, USC’s online students will only come to
campus once...

The Brookings Institution has come out with a “value added”
ranking of myriad 4-year and 2-year colleges.Essentially, it is an attempt to rank the extra pay and other attributes
graduates receive adjusted for student and college characteristics. Some of the
dependent variables related to things like loan repayment and completion rates.
There is a measure based on “mid-career” (10-year experience) earnings reported
by grads to an online source. For 4-year schools, mid-career earnings refer
only to grads who stopped their educations at the bachelor degree level. Another measure
involves how the school moved grads into particular occupations that may (or
may not) pay well. It uses national average pay by occupation (including pay due
to degrees beyond the bachelor level).

Below are the value added scores (percent above predicted)
for the various UC campuses for mid-career earnings (all alumni) and occupation,
respectively.

You’ll
notice that a) the data are noisy and b) hard to interpret. That’s probably
just as well. Although the authors say the data are useful for deciding on
where to go to college, they are probably more useful for making broad
generalizations about the economics of higher education than evaluating one
school against another. The authors in fact provide such generalizations:

Five college quality factorsseem to be key to how well students perform economically
in the years after college:

Curriculum
value: The amount earned by people who hold degrees in a
field offered by the college;

Alumni skills: The average labor market value of skills listed on
resumes;

STEM orientation: The share of graduates prepared to work in STEM
occupations;

Completion rates: The share earning their degrees within four years
for a two-year college and eight years for a four-year college;

Student aid: The average financial support offered by the
institution.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Dozens of documents leaked on Facebook Monday allege that members of
the undergraduate student government LET’S ACT! slate illegally spent
student fee funds on its past two campaigns, sold alcohol and marijuana
to raise campaign revenue and solicited money from student groups in
return for representation in the slate. The documents, released hours after campaigning began for this year’s
Undergraduate Students Association Council election, also alleged= that
LET’S ACT! plotted to take control over departments in the Community
Programs Office, which houses some student retention and access
programs. LET’S ACT! campaign manager Kristine de los Santos denies the slate
sold marijuana and alcohol and held any parties, but did not deny that
some of the files originated from LET’S ACT! documents. The second-year
political science student said she thinks whoever uploaded the files
copied and pasted LET’S ACT! documents and then edited them...

The undergraduate student government Judicial Board ruled Monday that the Bruins United slate violated online campaigning rules last week, after the slate appealed an Election Board sanction.The Undergraduate Students Association Council Election Board sanctioned Bruins United and LET’S ACT! candidates
on April 17 for posting cover photos it considered promotional on
Facebook earlier in the week. The Bruins United photos featured
candidates with facts about them and included one of the slate’s
commonly used slogans, “Be You,” before online campaigning was scheduled
to begin. The sanction blocked the slates from online campaigning for two days...

Monday, April 27, 2015

You see we first posted some questions about a piece on UC that appeared in Grizzly Bear Project. We got no answers. Then we noticed the Grizzly piece was re-posted in Capitol Weekly and still we got no answers.* Now the San Diego Union-Tribune has taken up the piece as an editorial with no questions or answers.** So, sad as we are, we will re-re-post:

Data questions: Could UC-Davis really have been run by 9
people in 1993 and then over 400 people twenty years later?You can't run a big campus with 9
people.If they are really just the very
top execs, it seems doubtful *by the same definition* there could be over 400
of them now.The definitions at the top
of your chart show different names for the managerial occupations in 1993 and
later.Are they really comparable?How many of the positions are on state money?
When I clicked on "get the data" on your chart, it just gave me
another view of the chart - but not data or specific sources and definitions.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

As Janet Napolitano and Jerry Brown battle over tuition increases
and state funding for the UC, faculty face eroding compensation and
increasing privatization of the university. Is shared governance still
meaningful amidst the race for private donations and bond-funded
construction? Where is the common ground between tenure and non-tenure
system faculty? How does the crisis of student loan debt change our
relationship with our students? Join representatives of the Academic
Senate, the Council of UC Faculty Associations, and the UC-AFT
(lecturers' union) for a open forum on faculty and the future of public
higher education in the age of austerity.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Blue Shield of California fired a top executive last month after he
spent more than $100,000 on his corporate credit card, the company says,
including on trips with girlfriend and "Sharknado" actress Tara Reid. The
details surfaced in a countersuit the health insurance giant filed
Tuesday alleging fraud by Aaron Kaufman, the company's former chief
technology officer. Mr.
Kaufman went to great lengths to avoid scrutiny of his expenses,
including intentionally misrepresenting his personal activities as
corporate events.- Steve Shivinsky, a spokesman for Blue Shield. Blue
Shield cited numerous examples of Kaufman's extravagant spending, some
of which came to light after an employee event involving Reid at a San
Francisco bowling alley. Some of the expenses cited by Blue Shield
included $17,491 that Kaufman spent on a Florida vacation to see Reid. He
also spent $832 for one night at the W hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,
with Reid on Jan. 21, according to the company. Three weeks later, he
ran up a corporate tab of $1,382 on drinks at the Warwick, a Hollywood
nightclub.But the night of bowling in early January drew the most attention inside Blue Shield. "At
some point during the evening, Mr. Kaufman's girlfriend acted
inappropriately, taking inappropriate photographs of herself and sharing
them," the company said in court documents. Blue Shield confirmed that
it was referring to Reid...

April is the big revenue month for the state income tax and as the chart above from the state controller shows, revenue is exceeding the estimate for the month made by the guv last January. The month isn't over yet and the receipts already include the estimate. Yes, there are the usual provisos about Prop 98 grabbing the money for K-14, etc. But the headline effect could be good for UC in its tuition/budget dispute with the guv as he releases the May Revise budget proposal.

Look for potential traffic problems in the morning of May 7 and possibly other times. From the Westwood-Century City Patch:

Former Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton will hold the first Southern California fundraisers for her campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination on May 7. Clinton
will attend a $2,700-per-person breakfast reception at the Westwood
home of Catherine Unger, a member of the Women’s Political Committee,
according to The Hollywood Reporter. Clinton will then move to
another $2,700-per-person event, a luncheon fundraiser at the Pacific
Palisades home of television producer Steven Bochco and his wife Dayna,
The Hollywood Reporter and Variety reported, citing sources with
knowledge of the campaign’s plans. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., will
attend the fundraiser. Clinton will also conduct a $2,700 per
person early dinner fundraiser at the Beverly Hills-area home of
billionaire media giant Haim Saban, according to the entertainment
industry trade publications...

Impacts: CEY Drive will be closed to southbound traffic. Northbound CEY
will remain open. Parking will not be allowed in Lot A, Dickson Court or
on CEY Drive (between Wyton and Westholme) from 5 am until 3 pm (parking will be available for customers with a Disabled
Placard).

Friday, April 24, 2015

Faithful readers of this blog will know that when an article appeared in a website called Grizzly Bear Project a few days ago about growth in management in UC, we noted some anomalies in the data presented and invited the author to clarify.* Our questions were:

Data questions: Could UC-Davis really have been run by 9
people in 1993 and then over 400 people twenty years later?You can't run a big campus with 9
people.If they are really just the very
top execs, it seems doubtful *by the same definition* there could be over 400
of them now.The definitions at the top
of your chart show different names for the managerial occupations in 1993 and
later.Are they really comparable?How many of the positions are on state money?
When I clicked on "get the data" on your chart, it just gave me
another view of the chart - but not data or specific sources and definitions.

Inside Higher Ed is running an extensive piece on conflicts at UCLA and Berkeley (but mainly UCLA) over the math requirement for students in life sciences:

For about as long as anyone can remember, most undergraduate natural
science majors have been required to take at least two semesters of
calculus. Lots of students -- especially those in the life sciences --
don’t end up using most of what they’ve learned later on in their
studies or their careers, but the requirement has endured...

“Our principal complaint with the calculus for life sciences is that it
is a horrible and hideous instrument of torture to life sciences
students taught by mathematicians who want to make third-rate
mathematicians out of our students and get angry when they fail,” said
Alan Garfinkel, professor of medicine and physiological science at UCLA,
who campaigned for and teaches the new math for life sciences course.
Still offered to a limited number of students, the sequence combines two
quarters of calculus and one each of probability and statistics into
three quarters total, with a lab, and focuses more on biology-based
problem sets. “I’m a professional mathematical biologist and I don’t use
freshman calculus at all.” ...

Thursday, April 23, 2015

In an effort to better understand the funding difficulties faced by public higher education institutions over the next decade, this study derives baseline state funding projections for higher education from underlying measures of economic growth. It does this by incorporating historical state government spending data with Moody’s Analytics proprietary models for state tax revenue and Medicaid spending. Over the past several decades, the growth in state funding for discretionary spending categories has declined at an alarming rate. Mandatory spending programs, specifically Medicaid, are requiring more and more state funds, which in the zero-sum world of state spending, has left fewer and fewer dollars for other programs. Medicaid spending, for example, was less than 10 percent of state sourced spending 30 years ago, but today accounts for nearly 16 percent. Taking all funding sources into account, Medicaid has grown to more than a quarter of total state spending. Higher education funding has borne the brunt of much of this crowding out, falling from around 14 percent of state sourced spending in the late 1980s to just over 12 percent today. Our baseline forecasts show that trend continuing throughout the next decade and beyond...

It might be noted that back when the Master Plan for Higher Ed was created, there was no Medicaid (Medi-Cal). However, the projections for California in the report above don't show much change in the share of state revenue going to higher ed out to 2024. It's pretty much a flat 7%. See Appendix D.1. Moreover, the share of California state revenue going to Medicaid (Medi-Cal) doesn't show much growth and its projected values seem out of line with recent actual values. See Appendix B.1. Undoubtedly, there has been some pushing out of higher ed historically, particularly when you take the numbers back to the 1960s. It is also worth noting that the outlook for the health care system is uncertain. Baby boom retirements will put pressure on the system but the direct effects will be more on Medicare, which is not a state program, than on Medicaid (Medi-Cal).

The next Regents meeting is May 21-22. That's about a month from now so it's a good time to remind the Board that other public entities not only live-stream their sessions but they archive them indefinitely. An example we like to point to is the City of Santa Monica which has meetings every couple of weeks (so a lot more meeting time than the Regents). It manages to live-stream audio/video and preserve the recordings indefinitely. In contrast, the Regents "archive" for only one year. That means that yours truly has to record the sessions in real time (one hour of recording for one hour of meeting time) in order to provide true archiving, a service of this blog.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

The Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO) has long been unhappy with the governor's habit of just putting a lump sum in the budget for UC, rather than tying the amount to some formula, at least based on enrollment. In a new publication, LAO continues that theme:

It should be noted that if LAO or the legislature has a complaint about the guv's budgetary practices, the issue is with him. Indeed, the entire Committee of Two process is really a reflection of the way in which the governor does business.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Above is a screenshot from a website called the Grizzly Bear Project that specializes in California reporting.* You may note something funny about the text. It refers to a chart that isn't there. Later in the article, there is a different chart that is there which reports data from 1993 and 2013 by UC campus showing a vast increase in what seem to be managerial positions. But when you look at the data, questions of meaning arise. So I attempted to use the site's "contact us" option to raise questions this morning:

Data questions: Could UC-Davis really have been run by 9
people in 1993 and then over 400 people twenty years later?You can't run a big campus with 9
people.If they are really just the very
top execs, it seems doubtful *by the same definition* there could be over 400
of them now.The definitions at the top
of your chart show different names for the managerial occupations in 1993 and
later.Are they really comparable?How many of the positions are on state money?
When I clicked on "get the data" on your chart, it just gave me
another view of the chart - but not data or specific sources and definitions.

However, two attempts to send the questions above to Grizzly Bear Project produced an error message. I couldn't find an alternative option under "contact us" for communicating with the site. The article concludes with:

The Cal State system has been able to cut its administration by more
than one-third from 1993-2013, while UC administration has more than
tripled over the same period. This is not to say that UC administration growth is to blame for the
entirety of the increases in student fees. But it does underscore one of
the trends – along with increasing enrollment and declining per capita
state investment – that has increased the cost of a UC education for
California students...

As blog readers will know, we at the UCLA Faculty Assn. are not interested on this website with defending administrative bloating at UC. But we do want accurate info to be part of the public debate, particularly as key decisions await regarding tuition and budgets at UC. So we are hoping that we can clear up any questions by posting this information. Perhaps someone at Grizzly Bear Project will respond.**
--
*http://www.grizzlybearproject.com/as-uc-tuition-increases-so-does-university-administration/
**Anyone at Grizzly Bear Project can email yours truly at daniel.j.b.mitchell@anderson.ucla.edu
--
UPDATE: While we await a possible response, it might be noted that the Grizzly Bear Project piece has been picked up and recirculated by at least two other websites today: The Nooner and Rough and Tumble.

We have asked in prior posts why - if the Committee of Two negotiations are going as well as was suggested at the last Regents meeting - UC prez Napolitano finds it necessary to drum up external support for the UC budget as the May Revise date approaches. The latest travel adventure of the UC prez reinforces that question. From the Fresno Bee:
University of California President Janet Napolitano is
hoping to light a fire under Fresno leaders and business people. Her
cause is simple: Let’s get lawmakers to pour more dollars into the UC
system. Fresno doesn’t often hear much noise about high education
funding, she told a group of nearly 200 Fresno Rotary Club members and
their guests on Monday. “I’d like you all to make some. And now would be a really good time,” she said. Napolitano
brought the plea during the Rotary Club’s weekly meeting in downtown.
The visit was part of a larger effort Napolitano is making to drum up
public support for boosting state funding for the 10 UC campuses and
avoiding proposed tuition hikes as high as 5% next school year...

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Amid a state budget standoff and a growing sense that a UC education is slipping out of reach for Californians, the University of California won't reveal its admission rates until next month -- an unusual delay that may reflect a startling number of rejections and wait-list notices high-schoolers have already received. Observers say UC could be withholding record-low admission rates to avoid further inflaming tensions as UC President Janet Napolitano tries to break a funding stalemate with Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers quick to accuse the university of shutting out their constituents. Last year, admission rates at UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara fell to less than half of what they were in the mid-1990s ...and the drop is expected to continue this year, with still more applicants vying for the same number of spots...

Saturday, April 18, 2015

The
probe upheld long-pressed complaints from three women faculty that they
were discriminated against by some men in the department and faced
retaliation for reporting breaches in research protocol, Jonathan Hiatt,
the vice dean for faculty, said in a letter sent to staff.

The
result was a significantly negative effect on the center and a working
environment that "compromises our research, teaching and patient care,"
Hiatt wrote. The March letter, which was obtained by The Times,
did not identify the women who say they were discriminated against nor
the people who they say violated campus rules. Hiatt could not be
reached for comment Friday night. Dale Tate, a spokeswoman for the
David Geffen School of Medicine, confirmed the authenticity of the
letter but said she could not offer any more details about the
situation...

Friday, April 17, 2015

In an earlier post, we noted that UC prez Napolitano's recent appeal to members of the UC community to lobby Gov. Brown for more money for the university suggested that she was not making headway with Brown with her tuition/budget plan adopted by the Regents last fall.* Yet another such indication comes with the article below in the LA Times, noting an appeal by the UC prez to an outside group:

Speaking to a group of fellow Italian American lawyers and judges,
University of California President Janet Napolitano this week recounted
her own family’s modest immigrant roots and urged Californians to help
increase funding higher education so that subsequent and future waves of
families can enter the middle class.Napolitano's
speech Wednesday evening was part of her effort to rally public support
for enough additional state funds for the 10-campus UC system so that a
tuition hike of as much as 5% next year can be avoided.She
and Gov. Jerry Brown have disagreed over the matter, with Brown
insisting that UC must continue to freeze tuition for a fourth
consecutive year with a tax funding increase that falls short of what
Napolitano has sought...

Thursday, April 16, 2015

As Janet Napolitano and Jerry Brown battle over tuition increases
and state funding for the UC, faculty face eroding compensation and
increasing privatization of the university. Is shared governance still
meaningful amidst the race for private donations and bond-funded
construction? Where is the common ground between tenure and non-tenure
system faculty? How does the crisis of student loan debt change our
relationship with our students? Join representatives of the Academic
Senate, the Council of UC Faculty Associations, and the UC-AFT
(lecturers' union) for a open forum on faculty and the future of public
higher education in the age of austerity.

Inside Higher Ed has a piece on water saving measures undertaken at California universities including UCLA:

The University of California at Los Angeles is finishing up one of its
largest water-related projects, a new filtration system that's estimated
to save 17.3 million gallons a year. The enhanced water-cleaning system was
created a few years ago by professors at the UCLA Water Technology
Research Center, so it advanced not only research but also institutional
goals to reduce water consumption...

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

At the last Regents meeting, although there really was no information provided about what was happening at the Committee of Two, the implicit message was that progress was being made. However, in the last day or so, a series of emails have gone out from UC prez Napolitano tailored to various groups - faculty, retirees, etc. - but all with the same message: Contact the governor about the UC budget. [Excerpt]

I am writing to ask that you join me in our efforts to secure full State funding for UC... To this end, I ask that you join me in this all-important effort and contact Gov.
Brown and your legislative representatives to let them know that investing in UC must be a top priority for the State...

All this communication could be taken as a routine effort to enhance the budget for UC as the May Revise nears. But presumably within the Committee of Two - the governor and the UC prez - such communication shouldn't be hard to achieve. Unless, of course, things are not going so well after all and Napolitano finds herself as a Committee of One. We'll know by mid-May.

...to campus "development" officials that large donations to the university don't have to be steered into jumbo-sized capital projects with questionable "business plans." See below from an email sent out yesterday which highlights a donation for research, not bricks:

Los Angeles (April 14, 2015)
— UCLA Anderson is thrilled to announce a gift of $10 million
to launch a new marketing center. Donald Morrison, UCLA Anderson
professor emeritus, and his wife, Sherie Morrison, UCLA distinguished
professor of microbiology, immunology, & molecular genetics,
provided the gift to establish the center, which will be named
the Morrison Family Center for Marketing Studies and Data Analytics.
Their donation is the largest single gift from a UCLA Anderson faculty
member...

The
Morrisons are long-time supporters and academic leaders of UCLA,
providing financial support for a number of the university’s most
critical areas of need that include athletics, biomedical sciences and
UCLA Anderson, where both of their daughters earned
their MBAs. Much of their philanthropy was made possible by Sherie
Morrison’s trailblazing work developing genetically engineered
antibodies. That research was lauded as a scientific breakthrough and
spawned development of many therapeutics. Sherie continues
her advanced research studies using antibody-based therapeutics to
treat cancer...

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

From the Daily Bruin [excerpt]: About 30 UCLA student health center doctors and other union members
marched to Chancellor Gene Block’s office Monday to demand a meeting
regarding student health center funding. The Union of American Physicians and Dentists, which has been
negotiating its first labor contract with the University for more than a
year, has been holding an unfair labor practice strike at all UC
campuses for the past few days. UCLA union members have been on strike
since Saturday, picketing during Bruin Day festivities over the weekend. The union claims that when requested, the UC refused to give
information regarding how the funding for the recent increases in
chancellors’ salaries was allocated and whether the chancellor’s’
discretionary funds could have been spent on improving student health
centers instead. The union first held a strike in January, protesting
similar issues...

A fire broke out early Tuesday inside a seven-story building at UCLA's Westwood campus, authorities said. The
blaze was reported at 1:31 a.m. in Building 48A of the School of
Dentistry, 714 Tiverton Ave., said Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman
Brian Humphrey. Nearly 115 firefighters knocked down the blaze
around 2:15 a.m., Humphrey said. Crews were able to contain the fire to a
classroom and office area. No injuries were reported and no faculty or
students were threatened by the fire...

Sunday, April 12, 2015

As blog readers will know, UC prez Napolitano debuted as a book reviewer in the pages of the LA Times not long ago.* She has now graduated as a book reviewer to the NY Times with a review of a book on the Boston marathon bombers. In it, she dismisses the author's conspiracy theory contention of involvement of the FBI.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

The controller's cash report for the state through March (first nine months of the fiscal year) is out. Headline news is that revenue is ahead of projections. But it's useful to look at the big three taxes - personal income, sales, and corporate profits - relative to the same period least year to see which sources are strong and which are weak. The percentage gains are below:

Personal Income Tax: Up about 12%
Sales Tax: Up about 4%
Corporate Profits: Up about 30%
All Revenues: Up about 11%

The trend inflation rate is around 2% so the real economy as experienced by most Californians - measured by sales - is growing at a two percent-ish rate. We are still heavily dependent on the boom/bust taxes (personal income and corporate profits) that could easily drop in any downturn. Keep that in mind when you think about the multi-year deal the governor wants on budget and tuition. What would happen in the outyears in such a deal if a downturn occurred? Would the governor be able to keep his end of the bargain?

UCLA’s faculty approved, by a large margin, a controversial new
policy that requires most future undergraduates to take a course on
ethnic, cultural, religious or gender diversity. The strongly
supportive vote announced Friday night was the culmination of efforts
that began two decades ago and previously faced rejections. In
a tally posted online, the campus-wide Faculty Senate voted 916 to 487
to begin the requirement for incoming freshmen in fall 2015 and new
transfer students in 2017. It would affect students in the College of
Letters and Science, which enrolls 85% of UCLA undergraduates...

Friday, April 10, 2015

Unionized doctors began a rolling strike Thursday at student health
clinics on UC campuses, accusing the university of unfair labor
practices during negotiations for the physicians’ first contract. The
walkout started early Thursday morning at five Northern and Central
California campuses -- Berkeley, Davis, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and
Merced -- and is scheduled to last four days. On
Saturday, the doctors, dentists and podiatrists are expected to begin a
four-day strike at the southern UC campuses at UCLA, San Diego, Irvine,
Riverside and Santa Barbara...

The 130 or so members of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists
previously held a one-day strike in late January at all 10 UC campuses.
The UC doctors were unionized in 2013...

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Will the Berkeley/Peevey scandal arrive at UCLA? Maybe, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune, although the problem described below seems more an issue for Peevey than for UCLA so far:

The scandal at the California Public
Utilities Commission has spread from one University of California campus to
another, as criminal investigators are asking questions about former commission
President Michael Peevey’s contacts with UCLA… His $250-a-plate farewell
soiree, attended by the kinds of industry insiders whose relationships with the
commission have come under scrutiny, was to benefit the University of
California, Berkeley, which ended up turning down the funds. Now investigators
are asking about Peevey’s contacts with the California Center for Sustainable
Communities at the University of California, Los Angeles. The center is one possible recipient
of $25 million to study greenhouse gas emissions funded by utility companies,
which is an element of the $4.7 billion settlement deal for premature closure
costs from the failed San Onofre nuclear power plant north of Oceanside. …The grant idea first became public
as a proposal in September 2014, but may have first been suggested at a secret
meeting between Peevey and a Southern California Edison executive in Warsaw,
Poland, in March 2013. Commission business is supposed to be conducted in
public. New records obtained by U-T San Diego show Peevey established contact
with Stephanie Pincetl of UCLA’s sustainable communities center as early as
December 2013 — nine months before Commissioner Michel Florio publicly
announced the greenhouse gas plan... Pincetl told the U-T she was
interviewed by investigators about the matter three weeks ago. She was unable
to explain how she knew before the public announcement that money from the San
Onofre settlement was coming available. “That is a good question,” she said. “I
don’t know.” ...Commission spokeswoman Terrie
Prosper did not respond to questions this week about why Peevey met and spoke
with UCLA about a campus energy center before he was supposed to have learned
about the funding opportunity. …According to the UCLA emails,
Peevey was offered and accepted a seat on an advisory board serving the
university’s Luskin Center for Innovation, a think tank that works to translate
research into public-policy solutions. ...The adopted settlement does not
restrict the $25 million grant to the Edison and SDG&E service territory,
and the money has yet to be awarded.

UC? Not so much. We have noted in prior posts that UC's vaccination requirement arrives lazily in 2017.* No rush at UC. Meanwhile, SB 277 requiring vaccinations in schools is moving along through the legislature.

California lawmakers on Wednesday approved a bill barring most
parents from opting out of vaccinations for children enrolled in school,
voting after a nearly four-hour emotional hearing that saw multiple
people ejected for shouting over legislators. The final vote was
6-2, with Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, and Sen. Jim Nielsen,
R-Gerber, opposing. The Senate Health Committee chair, Sen. Ed
Hernandez, D-Azusa , abstained. The measure faces several more committee
hearings before a potential Senate floor vote. Conceived in response to recent outbreaks of diseases such as measles and whooping cough, Senate Bill 277
removes the “personal belief exemption” allowing California parents to
enroll kids in school without having them receive the prescribed range
of shots. Doctors and public health officials warn that climbing rates
of exemptions threaten to undo the “herd immunity” protecting people who
are too young or ill to be vaccinated...